The luck and loneliness of the
long-distance worker

In the traditional office, workers are much
like the individual members in a symphony
orchestra. They rely on a broad range of verbal
and non-verbal interactions to coordinate their
efforts. Much as string players watch each other
to synchronize bow strokes, workers adjust their
pace so that it is compatible with fellow
workers. Meanwhile, the boss acts something like
the conductor, keeping the entire office together
and prompting workers when needed.

Today, however, this model of office work is
under assault. The rise of telecommuting is
steadily increasing the percentage of employees
who work from home or nearby satellite offices.
According to the best estimates, the number of
people who are engaged in some form of
telecommuting grew from 1.6 percent in 1992 to
6.3 percent in 1997. Full-time telecommuters
remain only a tiny fraction of the workforce, but
the social impacts of powerful new technologies
including the Internet and cell phones are just
beginning.

In addition to telecommuting, globalization of
the world economy has meant that an increasing
number of offices include employees who are
spread not only around the country but around the
world. And the rise of e-mail, voicemail,
cellular phones and other similar communications
technologies are rapidly breaking down the 8-to-5
time barrier that has restricted work in previous
generations.

In today's work-a-day world, workers
increasingly inhabit separate rooms, buildings or
even countries, and communicate by phone, fax,
videoconference or computer. Although these
changes can lead to increased flexibility and
higher productivity, they also raise a number of
important issues. These concerns were the subject
of a July campus workshop attended by about 50
academic and industry representatives who met to
discuss the sociology of a business world where
workers increasingly interact across spatial,
organizational and cultural expanses.

The workshop ­ jointly sponsored by the
Alliance for Innovative Manufacturing at Stanford
(AIMS) and by the Center for Work, Technology and
Organization (WTO) in Stanford's Industrial
Engineering and Engineering Management (IEEM)
Department ­ was organized by IEEM Professors
Stephen R. Barley and Robert I. Sutton.

(AIMS is a campus-based joint venture of
Stanford's Graduate School of Business, the
School of Engineering and a number of corporate
partners; its mission is to encourage advances in
manufacturing and to disseminate these advances
throughout industry and academia. WTO, also
supported by several industrial partners, studies
relationships among technologies and
organizations and their interactions with how
work is carried out.)

The group concluded that getting people to
work effectively in different locations isn't
just a matter of seeing that their
telecommunications technology is in good working
order. The quality of the equipment is important,
of course, but it is equally important that the
individuals involved realize that they must
communicate clearly and explicitly with managers
and fellow workers. All the non-verbal cues and
much of the informal talk that play a critical,
behind-the-scenes role in the functioning of an
office tend to be filtered out. For this reason,
it is essential to schedule periodic face-to-face
meetings between coworkers, otherwise their
productivity will begin to suffer.

"When workers are co-located, they share
a common context," said Pamela Hinds,
assistant professor in IEEM at Stanford.
"People can hear over their cubicles, they
absorb information through osmosis. When they're
not co-located, there can be surprises. They're
in different physical surroundings, with
different schedules, pressures and cultures ­
plus, they're operating in more fluid team
structures and have not only geographical
distance separating them but technology mediating
their interactions."

Thus, while the opportunity to form global
teams allows access to global expertise, Hinds
warned, this expertise may be more difficult to
share when workers are widely distributed.

Bonding is crucial to group performance, but
"it's hard to get 'face time' when your face
isn't actually there," said Hinds. It helps
if a group of people collaborating from a
distance know each other ahead of time, she said.

One of the much-touted advantages of working
at home is that it is easier to stay focused,
because there are fewer unanticipated
interruptions. But, said Lotus Institute senior
scientist Kate Ehrlich, "you miss out on
some of the ad hoc conversation," the kind
of scuttlebutt that can be key to getting
promoted. Even during the more formal atmosphere
of a conference call, "if there are too many
people hooked up, remote workers have trouble
breaking in because they don't have the visual
cues," she added. (Lotus Institute is based
in Cambridge, Mass., and is a unit of Lotus
Development Corp.)

"There's no substitute for face-to-face
contact," agreed Stu Winby, director of
strategic changes at Hewlett-Packard Co., who
noted that distributed work groups tend to follow
a pattern: Face-to-face meetings are followed by
a short burst of activity that drops off after a
few weeks.

"The most productive groups have been
those that went out and drank together," he
said.

Silence kills and so does ambiguity, agreed
Professor Catherine Cramton of George Mason
University's School of Management in Fairfax, Va.

Cramton told of her study of 13
internationally distributed work teams composed
of graduate business students and spanning nine
time zones. "I read 1,754 pieces of e-mail,
three times each. It was easy to see why they
were killing each other. The bucket of
information passed around was leaking all over.
There was error all over the place," Cramton
said.

One individual's e-mail address was
inaccurately recorded, for example, so early
transmissions to him got deleted, and other
members of his team thought he was sloughing off.
"Once these impressions are formed,"
Cramton said, "they're excruciatingly
difficult to get rid of."

Cramton found a curious tendency among
distributed workers to attribute problems to
individuals rather than to situations. She
confirmed this predilection with a controlled
experiment of distributed vs. co-located workers.
Cramton attributed some of this tendency to
personalize problems to remote workers' failure
to share relevant background information with
partners. For instance, if a student team member
has to cut back on her participation because she
has an exam coming up but she doesn't tell her
team members about it, they are likely to draw
the wrong conclusion.

"It's difficult for us to imagine what we
need to tell [remote co-workers]," she said.
"And even when such information was
shared, partners would sometimes forget they'd
seen it."

Distributed workers have great difficulty in
interpreting colleagues' silence: "The
absence of a response can mean 'I agree,' 'I
disagree,' 'I'm out of town' or 'I didn't realize
you wanted a response.'" When there are long
lags in feedback, Cramton said, these
communications problems can intensify. "It's
like you're in the shower and not getting hot
water right away, so you keep turning it up
hotter and hotter," creating a disaster.

Another source of misplaced blame, she said,
was differences in relative speed of access to
information, a result of different
infrastructures. "The slow ones got tagged
as laggards," she said. Cramton's research
has led to an overarching recommendation: Seek
out information about the situations of remote
partners, rather than assume you know.

Jonathan Grudin, a senior researcher at
Microsoft and former professor of information and
computer science at the University of
California-Irvine, also found that people are
often blamed for problems caused by technology.

In one case Grudin studied, two groups were
assembled in separate meeting rooms as part of a
teleconferencing experiment. One of the rooms was
equipped with the kind of two-way audio embodied
in a good phone system: When people on both ends
of the line are talking at once, each can still
hear the other. The other room, though, had older
equipment, the kind in which sound traveling in
one direction causes sound from the other
direction to be cut off ­ a situation familiar
to those who remember the early days of satellite
long-distance telephony.

The "impaired audio" group, assuming
the other group's audio capability to be similar,
conscientiously adopted an ultra-quiet manner ­
no side conversations or paper rustling ­ so as
not to cut off conversation. The other group,
blithely unaware of the problem at the other end,
maintained a steady pace of laughing, joking and
other noise. "The second group was perceived
to be 'disrespectful' by the first group, while
the first group appeared 'overly formal' to the
second one," Grudin said.

Cultural clashes also occur between people in
traditional versus distributed settings, Winby
said. Not that everybody wants to telecommute.
"Some workers need an office to go to,
because they feel too isolated at home. But you
reward remote workers based on their results ­
you don't spy on them," he said. So it
doesn't matter if they move to Honolulu and go to
the beach every day or work one day a year as
long as they're meeting management objectives.
But problems will arise, Winby said, when "a
worker from the central office says, 'Not fair! I
called her and she was at the beach!'"

Buried in such jealousy lies a hard kernel of
rationality. Collective experience with
telecommuting has taught managers that a lot of
work that gets done is "invisible" ­
it's not really assigned to anyone, noted the
Lotus Institute's Ehrlich. Senior employees, with
the biggest stores of tacit knowledge, often are
doing the telecommuting and leaving junior
employees to their own devices, she said.
"But people often don't spontaneously call a
distributed worker, because they have a mental
model that he or she is working at home, so
shouldn't be interrupted."

Some studies claim telecommuters are more
productive and more satisfied than their
office-bound colleagues. But Stanford IEEM
Assistant Professor Diane Bailey voiced
skepticism. Such studies, she said, are often
based on self-reports. "These workers are
self-selected. They chose to telecommute
­ so of course they're more satisfied. They also
tend to work longer hours, and they may be
conflating that with higher productivity."
In other words, they're getting more done because
they're working more, not working better.

For all its vaunted family-friendliness,
telecommuting carries some familial risks, Bailey
said: "Kids can handle 'Daddy is at work far
away.' But when you try to explain that daddy is
in his office and can't be disturbed, they have
trouble understanding it." Also, when you
jettison the physical commute, "you lose the
cooling-off period. Whatever stress you've
accumulated during the workday, you have a
half-hour to work off on the freeway," she
said to knowing laughter.

Other relevant material:

Center for Work, Technology and Organization

http://www.stanford.edu/group/WTO/

NOTE: This article is available electronically
on the national Eurekalert! web site ­
www.eurekalert.org